Hi, I’m Michael Rawdon, the author of Fascination Place.
FP is a general-purpose web journal with personal content as well as lots and lots of verbiage about my hobbies: Reading science fiction and comic books, watching baseball, listening to progressive rock music, etc. Not everything might be your cup of tea, but hopefully there will be something here for many people.
Some Tips About This Journal
I’m making (perhaps) an unusual use of categories (that’s the list of topics in the sidebar on the left) in this journal: If you view a category, it will both include some information about why that category is important to me, and some additional information (such as a list of related links) in the sidebar on the right.
Maybe it’s overkill, but I figured I’d try it, at least!
If you’re curious, you can read some technical details about this journal.
Who Am I?
I’m a fortysomething programmer working in Silicon Valley, CA. I work on the Xcode developer tools at Apple Computer.
I live with my girlfriend and our four (!) cats. Before moving to California I’ve lived in suburban Boston, New Orleans, and Madison Wisconsin.
I’m a long-time netizen, having been active on USENET back in 1989, and creating my first Web page near the dawn of the Web, in 1994. In August 1997 I started Gazing Into The Abyss, one of the earliest web journals (predating the term “Weblog” by a few months!). In August 2006 I decided I wanted to move off my old, home-brew journal software, so I bought space at DreamHost and created Fascination Place using WordPress, thus joining the rest of the 21st century journalling world.
My attitude towards journalling can be summed up by this quote from CJ Silverio’s excellent Rant on Why the Web Sucks (1995):
It’s the content
The rest of it is window-dressing. You can make your pages look absolutely fabulous but if they don’t say anything, nobody’s going to care. Don’t give the world another glorified multimedia dot-finger file. Give the world your art, your music, your poetry, your political rants, your short stories, your first grade photos, your shareware and freeware, your archives of hobby stuff, your hints about how to make great tie-dye, your really handy Perl script, your list of the ten best bookstores in the Greater Podunk area. You know something that nobody else knows. You can do something that nobody else can do quite the same way. You’ve made something that the rest of the world has never seen.
Share it. Put it in your web page.
Welcome! Read! Enjoy!